Document history - Amazon Step Functions
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Document history

This section lists major changes to the Amazon Step Functions Developer Guide.

Change Description Date changed
Documentation-only update

Added a Note about unavailability of X-Ray tracing for the Distributed Map state. For more information, see Amazon X-Ray and Step Functions.

 March 21, 2023
Documentation-only update

Added information about how Step Functions handles tag-based authorization. For more information, see Tagging in Step Functions and Tag-based Policies.

 March 15, 2023
Documentation-only update

Added information about how Step Functions parses CSV files used as input in Distributed Map state. For more information, see CSV file in an Amazon S3 bucket.

 March 14, 2023
Documentation-only update

Reduce the history retention period of your completed workflow executions from 90 days to 30 days. For more information about adjusting the retention period, see Execution guarantees and Quotas related to state machine executions.

 February 21, 2023
Update

Step Functions has expanded support for Amazon SDK integrations by adding 35 Amazon services and 1100 new API actions. For more information, see Supported Amazon SDK service integrations and Summary of Amazon SDK integration updates.

 February 17, 2023
Documentation-only update

Published a Getting Started tutorial series that walks you through the process of creating a workflow for credit card application using Step Functions. For more information, see Getting started with Amazon Step Functions.

 December 30, 2022
Update

Step Functions now provides a new console experience for viewing and debugging Express workflow executions. For more information see:

 October 18, 2022
Update

Added support to optionally specify the ExecutionRoleArn parameter while using the addStep and addStep.sync APIs for the Amazon EMR optimized service integration. For more information, see Call Amazon EMR with Step Functions.

 September 20, 2022
Documentation-only update

Added a new topic that provides recommendations about optimizing cost while building serverless workflows using Step Functions. For more information, see Cost-optimization using Express Workflows.

 September 15, 2022

Update

Step Functions adds support for 14 new intrinsic functions for performing data processing tasks, such as array manipulations, data encoding and decoding, hash calculations, JSON data manipulation, math function operations, and unique identifier generation.

Documentation-only update:

Grouped all the existing and newly introduced intrinsic functions into the following categories based on the type of data processing task they help you perform:

For more information, see Intrinsic functions.

August 31, 2022
Update

Step Functions has expanded support for Amazon SDK integrations by adding three more Amazon services–Amazon Billing Conductor, Amazpn GameSparks, and Amazon Pinpoint SMS and Voice V2. For more information, see Change log for supported Amazon SDK integrations.

 July 26, 2022
Documentation-only update

Added a new topic to include a summary of all the updates made to Amazon SDK integrations supported by Step Functions. For more information, see Summary of Amazon SDK integration updates

 July 26, 2022
Documentation-only update

Amazon Step Functions Developer Guide now includes details about the execution metrics that are emitted specifically for Express Workflows. For more information, see Execution Metrics for Express Workflows.

 June 09, 2022
Update
Step Functions console enhancements

The console now features a redesigned Execution Details page that includes the following enhancements:

  • Ability to identify the reason for a failed execution at a glance.

  • Two new modes of visualizations for your state machine – Table view and Event view. These views also provide you the ability to apply filters to only view the information of interest. In addition, you can sort the Event view contents based on the event timestamps.

  • Switch between the different iterations of Map state in the Graph view mode using a dropdown list or in the Table view mode's tree view for Map states.

  • View in-depth information about each state in the workflow, including the complete input and output data transfer path and retry attempts for Task or Parallel states.

  • Miscellaneous enhancements including the option to copy the state machine's execution Amazon Resource Name, view the count of total state machine transitions, and export the execution details in JSON format.

Documentation-only updates

Added a new topic to explain the various types of information displayed in the Execution Details page. Also, added a tutorial to show how to examine this information. For more information, see:

 May 09, 2022

Update

Step Functions now provides a workaround to prevent the confused deputy security issue, which arises when an entity (a service or an account) is coerced by a different entity to perform an action. For more information, see:

May 02, 2022

Update

April 19, 2022

New feature

Step Functions Local now supports Amazon SDK integration and mocking of service integrations. For more information, see:

January 28, 2022

New feature

Amazon Step Functions now supports creating an Amazon API Gateway REST API with synchronous express state machine as backend integration using the Amazon Cloud Development Kit (Amazon CDK). For more information, see:

December 10, 2021

Update

Step Functions has added three new sample projects that demonstrate the integration of Step Functions and Amazon Athena's upgraded console. For more information, see:

November 22, 2021

New feature

Step Functions has added Amazon VPC endpoints support for Synchronous Express Workflows. For more information, see:

November 15, 2021

Update

Amazon Step Functions has added three new sample projects that demonstrate how to use the Step Functions Amazon Batch integration. For more information, see:

October 14, 2021

New feature

Amazon Step Functions has added Amazon SDK integrations, letting you use the API actions for all of the more than two hundred Amazon services. For more information, see:

September 30, 2021

New feature

Amazon Step Functions has added a visual workflow designer, the Amazon Step Functions Workflow Studio. For more information, see:

June 17, 2021

Update

Amazon Step Functions has added four new APIs, StartBuildBatch, StopBuildBatch, RetryBuildBatch and DeleteBuildBatch, to the CodeBuild integration. For more information, see:

June 4, 2021

New feature

Amazon Step Functions now integrates with Amazon EventBridge. For more information, see:

May 14, 2021

Update

Amazon Step Functions has added a new sample project that shows how to use Step Functions and the Amazon Redshift Data API to run an ETL/ELT workflow. For more information, see:

April 16, 2021

New feature

Amazon Step Functions has a new data flow simulator in the console. For more information, see:

April 8, 2021

New feature

Amazon Step Functions now integrates with Amazon EMR on EKS. For more information, see:

March 29, 2021

Update

YAML support for state machine definitions has been added to Amazon Toolkit for Visual Studio Code and Amazon CloudFormation. For more information, see:

March 4, 2021

New feature

Amazon Step Functions now integrates with Amazon Glue DataBrew. For more information, see:

January 6, 2021

New feature

Amazon Step Functions Synchronous Express Workflows are now available, giving you an easy way to orchestrate microservices. For more information, see:

November 24, 2020

New feature

Amazon Step Functions now integrates with Amazon API Gateway. For more information, see:

November 17, 2020

New feature

Amazon Step Functions now integrates with Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service. For more information, see:

November 16, 2020

New feature

Amazon Step Functions now integrates with Amazon Athena. For more information, see:

October 22, 2020

New feature

Amazon Step Functions now supports tracing end-to-end workflows with Amazon X-Ray, giving you full visibility across state machine executions and making it easier to analyze and debug your distributed applications. For more information, see:

September 14, 2020
Update

Amazon Step Functions now supports payload sizes up to 262,144 bytes of data as a UTF-8 encoded string. This lets you process larger payloads in both Standard and Express workflows.

Your existing state machines do not need to be changed in order to use the larger payloads. However, you will need to update to the latest versions of the Step Functions SDK and Local Runner to use the updated APIs. For more information, see:

 September 3, 2020

Update

The Amazon States Language has been updated as follows:

  • Choice Rules has added

    • A null comparison operator, IsNull. IsNull tests against the JSON null value, and can be used to detect if the output of a previous state is null or not.

    • Four other new operators have been added, IsBoolean, IsNumeric, IsString and IsTimestamp.

    • A test for the existence or non-existence of a field using the IsPresent operator. IsPresent can be used to prevent States.Runtime errors when there is an attempt to access a non-existent key.

    • Wildcard pattern matching to support string comparison against patterns with one or more wildcards.

    • Comparison between two variables for supported comparison operators.

  • Timeout and heartbeat values in a Task state can now be provided dynamically from the state input instead of a fixed value using the TimeoutSecondsPath and HeartbeatSecondsPath fields. See the Task state for more information.

  • The new ResultSelector field provides a way to manipulate a state’s result before ResultPath is applied. The ResultSelector field is an optional field in the Map, Parallel, and Task states.

  • Intrinsic functions have been added to allow basic operations without Task states. Intrinsic functions can be used within the Parameters and ResultSelector fields.

August 13, 2020
Update

Amazon Step Functions now supports the Amazon SageMaker CreateProcessingJob API call. For more information, see:

 August 4, 2020

New feature

Amazon Step Functions is now supported by Amazon Serverless Application Model, making it easier to integrate workflow orchestration into your serverless applications. For more information, see:

May 27, 2020
New feature Amazon Step Functions has introduced a new synchronous invocation for nesting Step Functions executions. The new invocation, arn:aws:states:::states:startExecution.sync:2, returns a JSON object. The original invocation, arn:aws:states:::states:startExecution.sync, continues to be supported, and returns a JSON-escaped string. For more information, see:
May 19, 2020

New feature

Amazon Step Functions now integrates with Amazon CodeBuild. For more information, see:

May 5, 2020
New feature

Step Functions is now supported in Amazon Toolkit for Visual Studio Code, making it easier to create and visualize state machine based workflows without leaving your code editor.

 March 31, 2020

Update

You can now configure logging to Amazon CloudWatch Logs for Standard workflows. For more information, see:

February 25, 2020

New feature

Amazon Step Functions can now be accessed without requiring a public IP address, directly from Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). For more information, see:

December 23, 2019

New feature

Express Workflows are a new workflow type, suitable for high-volume event processing workloads such as IoT data ingestion, streaming data processing and transformation, and mobile application backends.

For more information, review the following new and updated topics.

December 3, 2019

New feature

Amazon Step Functions now integrates with Amazon EMR. For more information, see:

November 19, 2019

Update

Amazon Step Functions has released the Amazon Step Functions Data Science SDK. For more information, see the following.

November 7, 2019

Update

Step Functions now supports more API actions for Amazon SageMaker, and includes two new sample projects to demonstrate the functionality. For more information, see the following.

October 3, 2019
New feature

Step Functions supports starting new workflow executions by calling StartExecution as an integrated service API. See:

 August 12, 2019
New feature

Step Functions includes the ability to pass a task token to integrated services, and pause the execution until that task token is returned with SendTaskSuccess or SendTaskFailure. See:

Step Functions now provides a way to access dynamic information about your current execution directly in the "Parameters" field of a state definition. See:

 May 23, 2019
New feature

Step Functions supports CloudWatch Events for execution status changes, see:

 May 8, 2019
New feature

Step Functions supports IAM permissions using tags. For more information, see:

 March 5, 2019
New feature

Step Functions Local is now available. You can run Step Functions on your local machine for testing and development. Step Functions Local is available for download as either a Java application, or as a Docker image. See Testing Step Functions State Machines Locally.

 February 4, 2019
New feature

Amazon Step Functions is now available in the Beijing and Ningxia regions. See Supported regions.

January 15, 2018
New feature

Step Functions supports resource tagging to help track your cost allocation. You can tag state machines on the Details page, or through API actions. See Tagging in Step Functions.

 January 7, 2019
New feature

Amazon Step Functions is now available in the Europe (Paris), and South America (São Paulo) regions. See Supported regions.

December 13, 2018
New feature

Amazon Step Functions is now available the Europe (Stockholm) region. See Supported regions for a list of supported regions.

December 12, 2018

New feature

You can now easily configure and generate a state definition for integrated services when editing your state definition. For more information, see:

December 10, 2018

New feature

Step Functions now integrates with some Amazon services. You can now directly call and pass parameters to the API of these integrated services from a task state in the Amazon States Language. For more information, see:

November 29, 2018

Update

Improved the description of TimeoutSeconds and HeartbeatSeconds in the documentation for task states. See Task.

October 24, 2018

Update

Improved the description for the Maximum execution history size limit and provided a link to the related best practices topic.

October 17, 2018

Update

Added a new tutorial to the Amazon Step Functions documentation: See Starting a State Machine Execution in Response to Amazon S3 Events.

September 25, 2018

Update

Removed the entry Maximum executions displayed in Step Functions console from the limits documentation. See Quotas.

September 13, 2018

Update

Added a best practices topic to the Amazon Step Functions documentation on improving latency when polling for activity tasks. See Avoid latency when polling for activity tasks.

August 30, 2018

Update

Improved the Amazon Step Functions topic on activities and activity workers. See Activities.

August 29, 2018

Update

Improved the Amazon Step Functions topic on CloudTrail integration. See Logging Step Functions Using Amazon CloudTrail.

August 7, 2018

Update

Added JSON examples to Amazon CloudFormation tutorial. See Creating a Lambda state machine for Step Functions using Amazon CloudFormation.

June 23, 2018

Update

Added a new topic on handling Lambda service errors. See Handle Lambda service exceptions.

June 20, 2018
New feature

Amazon Step Functions is now available the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) region. See Supported regions for a list of supported regions.

June 28, 2018
New feature

Amazon Step Functions is now available the Amazon GovCloud (US-West) region. See Supported regions for a list of supported regions. For information about using Step Functions in the Amazon GovCloud (US-West) Region, see Amazon GovCloud (US).

 June 28, 2018

Update

Improved documentation on error handling for Parallel states. See Error Handling.

June 20, 2018

Update

Improved documentation about Input and Output processing in Step Functions. Learn how to use InputPath, ResultPath, and OutputPath to control the flow of JSON through your workflows, states, and tasks. See:

June 7, 2018

Update

Improved code examples for parallel states. See Parallel.

June 4, 2018

New feature

You can now monitor API and Service metrics in CloudWatch. See Monitoring Step Functions Using CloudWatch.

May 25, 2018
Update StartExecution, StopExecution, and StateTransition now have increased throttling limits in the following regions:

  • US East (N. Virginia)

  • US West (Oregon)

  • Europe (Ireland)

For more information see Quotas. 		May 16, 2018
New feature

Amazon Step Functions is now available the US West (N. California) and Asia Pacific (Seoul) regions. See Supported regions for a list of supported regions.

 May 5, 2018
Update

Updated procedures and images to match changes to the interface.

 April 25, 2018
Update

Added a new tutorial that shows how to start a new execution to continue your work. See Continuing Long-running Workflow Executions as a New Execution. This tutorial describes a design pattern that can help avoid some service limitations. See Avoid reaching the history quota.

 April 19, 2018
Update

Improved introduction to states documentation by adding conceptual information about state machines. See States.

 March 9, 2018
Update In addition to HTML, PDF, and Kindle, the Amazon Step Functions Developer Guide is available on GitHub. To leave feedback, choose the GitHub icon in the upper right-hand corner.

March 2, 2018
Update Added a topic describing other resources relating to Step Functions.

See Related information.

 February 20, 2018
New feature
February 19, 2018
Update Added a topic that describes an example activity worker written in Ruby. This implementation can be used to create a Ruby activity worker directly, or as a design pattern for creating an activity worker in another language.

See Example Activity Worker in Ruby.

 February 6, 2018
Update Added a new tutorial describing a design pattern that uses a Lambda function to iterate a count.

See Creating a Step Functions state machine that uses Lambda.

 January 31, 2018
Update Updated content on IAM permissions to include DescribeStateMachineForExecution and UpdateStateMachine APIs.

See Creating Granular IAM Permissions for Non-Admin Users.

 January 26, 2018
Update Added newly available regions: Canada (Central), Asia Pacific (Singapore).

See Supported regions.

 January 25, 2018
Update Updated tutorials and procedures to reflect that IAM allows you to select Step Functions as a role. January 24, 2018
Update Added a new Best Practices topic that suggests not passing large payloads between states.

See Use Amazon S3 ARNs instead of passing large payloads.

 January 23, 2018
Update Corrected procedures to match updated interface for creating a state machine:
January 17, 2018
New Feature You can use Sample Projects to quickly provision state machines and all related Amazon resources. See Sample projects for Step Functions,

Available sample projects include:

Note

These sample projects and related documentation replace tutorials that described implementing the same functionality.

 January 11, 2018
Update Added a Best Practices section that includes information on avoiding stuck executions. See Best practices for Step Functions. January 5, 2018
Update Added a note on how retries can affect pricing:
Note

Retries are treated as state transitions. For information about how state transitions affect billing, see Step Functions Pricing.

 December 8, 2017
Update Added information related to resource names:
Note

Step Functions allows you to create state machine, execution, and activity names that contain non-ASCII characters. These non-ASCII names don't work with Amazon CloudWatch. To ensure that you can track CloudWatch metrics, choose a name that uses only ASCII characters.

 December 6, 2017
Update Improved security overview information and added a topic on granular IAM permissions. See Security in Amazon Step Functions and Creating Granular IAM Permissions for Non-Admin Users. November 27, 2017
New Feature

You can update an existing state machine. See Update your state machine.

 November 15, 2017
Update

Added a note to clarify Lambda.Unknown errors and linked to the Lambda documentation in the following sections:

Note

Unhandled errors in Lambda are reported as Lambda.Unknown in the error output. These include out-of-memory errors and function timeouts. You can match on Lambda.Unknown, States.ALL, or States.TaskFailed to handle these errors. When Lambda hits the maximum number of invocations, the error is Lambda.TooManyRequestsException. For more information about Lambda function errors, see Error handling and automatic retries in the Amazon Lambda Developer Guide.

October 17, 2017
Update

Corrected and clarified IAM instructions and updated the screenshots in all tutorials.

 October 11, 2017
Update
October 6, 2017
Update

Rewrote the IAM instructions in the following sections to reflect changes in the IAM console:

 October 5, 2017
Update

Rewrote the State Machine Data section.

 September 28, 2017
New feature

The limits related to API action throttling are increased for all regions where Step Functions is available.

September 18, 2017
Update

  • Corrected and clarified information about starting new executions in all tutorials.

  • Corrected and clarified information in the Quotas related to accounts section.

September 14, 2017
Update

Rewrote the following tutorials to reflect changes in the Lambda console:

August 28, 2017
New feature

Step Functions is available in Europe (London).

August 23, 2017
New feature

The visual workflows of state machines let you zoom in, zoom out, and center the graph.

August 21, 2017

New feature
Important

An execution can't use the name of another execution for 90 days.

When you make multiple StartExecution calls with the same name, the new execution doesn't run and the following rules apply.

 August 18, 2017
Input Type Execution State
Open Closed
Identical Success ExecutionAlreadyExists
Different ExecutionAlreadyExists ExecutionAlreadyExists

For more information, see the name request parameter of the StartExecution API action in the Amazon Step Functions API Reference.
Update

Added information about an alternative way of passing the state machine ARN to the Creating a Step Functions API Using API Gateway tutorial.

August 17, 2017
Update Added the new Creating a Job Status Poller tutorial.

August 10, 2017

New feature
August 3, 2017

Update

Updated the instructions in the Step 1: Create an IAM Role for API Gateway section.

July 18, 2017

Update

Corrected and clarified information in the Choice section.

 June 23, 2017

Update

Added information about using resources under other Amazon accounts to the following tutorials:

June 22, 2017

Update

Corrected and clarified information in the following sections:

June 21, 2017

Update

Rewrote all tutorials to match the Step Functions console refresh.

 June 12, 2017

New feature

Step Functions is available in Asia Pacific (Sydney).

June 8, 2017

Update

Restructured the Amazon States Language section.

June 7, 2017

Update

Corrected and clarified information in the Creating an Activity State Machine Using Step Functions section.

June 6, 2017

Update

Corrected the code examples in the Examples using Retry and using Catch section.

June 5, 2017

Update

Restructured this guide using Amazon documentation standards.

May 31, 2017

Update

Corrected and clarified information in the Parallel section.

May 25, 2017

Update

Merged the Paths and Filters sections into the Input and Output Processing in Step Functions section.

May 24, 2017

Update

Corrected and clarified information in the Monitoring Step Functions Using CloudWatch section.

May 15, 2017

Update

Updated the GreeterActivities.java worker code in the Creating an Activity State Machine Using Step Functions tutorial.

May 9, 2017

Update

Added an introductory video to the What is Amazon Step Functions? section.

April 19, 2017

Update

Corrected and clarified information in the following tutorials:

April 19, 2017

Update

Added information about Lambda templates to the Creating a Step Functions state machine that uses Lambda and Handling error conditions using a Step Functions state machine tutorials.

April 6, 2017

Update

Changed the "Maximum input or result data size" limit to "Maximum input or result data size for a task, state, or execution" (32,768 characters). For more information, see Quotas related to task executions.

March 31, 2017

New feature

March 21, 2017

New feature

March 16, 2017

New feature

Step Functions is available in Europe (Frankfurt).

March 7, 2017

Update

Reorganized the topics in the table of contents and updated the following tutorials:

February 23, 2017

New feature

  • The State Machines page of the Step Functions console includes the Copy to New and Delete buttons.

  • Updated the screenshots to match the console changes.

February 23, 2017

New feature

February 14, 2017

New feature

February 10, 2017

Update

Clarified the current behavior of the ResultPath and OutputPath fields in relation to Parallel states.

February 6, 2017

Update

  • Clarified state machine naming restrictions in tutorials.

  • Corrected some code examples.

January 5, 2017

Update

Updated Lambda function examples to use the latest programming model.

December 9, 2016

New feature

The initial release of Step Functions.

December 1, 2016